Goodbye to gin, chocolate, profanity and not walking

Crazed community activist Justin Rudd doesn’t have a real job. At least not the kind of job where you throw a salami sandwich and an apple into a lunch bucket and carpool it to the plant. His job is coming up with things to make people into better people. He does weight-loss festivals, turkey trots, beach cleanups and about 3,200 other things to get people involved in their community.

We’re able to evade a lot of his projects, but he nabs us a few times each year to do things like judge baked desserts.

He got us again Tuesday morning. We were quietly enjoying our life of excess and nonsacrifice when we blundered upon his latest effort: Justin Rudd’s 40-Day Challenge.

Some people call it Lent.

The 40-day Lenten abstinence is meant to recollect the 40 days of fasting that Jesus endured in the desert, as chronicled in your Bible by Matthew, Mark and Luke (John was strangely mute on the subject), and many Christian denominations have observed Lent annually, starting on Ash Wednesday and lasting for various amounts of time by various denominations. Catholics, for instance, don’t count Sundays and end the Lenten Season on Holy Thursday, per Vatican II (which also allowed for what we call Banjo Masses and various touchy-feely things being brought into the liturgy).

But enough about Jesus. Let’s steer the conversation back to us and how we’re going to accept Justin Rudd’s 40-Day Challenge, which is to give up four things (or add things of merit) for 40 days. Heretically and curiously, Rudd began his Abstinence-O-Rama on Fat Tuesday, the one day you’re not supposed to give up anything at all. Even Floridian tent revivalists wouldn’t go that far.

Lent, as Rudd’s event typifies, has taken serious root in the secular part of society as well, an abbreviated New Year’s Resolution that mercifully ends in about six weeks.

But enough about Judd. Why are we always veering away from ourself? Is it because, we might suspect, that we’re afraid of giving up things that we don’t want to give up, like chocolate and gin and the basest sort of fast food you can find and would rather talk about Jesus and Rudd than our horrible self-indulgences?

No. We have never run away from a challenge (that’s a lie; maybe our biggest yet). Part of Justin’s gauntlet-hurl is to list your give-ups on the Facebook page “Justin Rudd’s 40-Day Challenge.” After hours of personal reflection, we were unable to come up with anything from which to abstain, whereas Bernice, our personal secretary, has a thousand suggestions of ways we can improve ourself through abstinence, if not eternal cessation. If you don’t want to be henpecked and hectored nine hours a day, do yourself a favor and don’t get a personal secretary.

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Anyhow, she heroically winnowed her list of things we do that bother her down to Rudd’s ration of four: Gin (Bernice tried to go yard on us by suggesting alcohol; we bargained her down to gin); chocolate (the easiest of all; we can abstain from chocolate in our sleep); profanity (the most difficult of all. Egad! Holy cow!); and not walking (because Lent is about abstention, the wording gets clumsy when you want to do something positive, like exercising: you have to abstain from not exercising).